NVIDIA keeps releasing new graphics cards. But the feeling is that it takes advantage of the current situation, doing very little to help gamers get them, while fueling the price hike.
For PC gamers, the last two years have been a nightmare. And the nightmare is far from over.
Due to the pandemic, the crisis of semiconductors and cryptocurrencies, for a year There is no stock of gaming graphics cards, and the few that exist have tripled their price.
The feeling that we gamers is that NVIDIA and AMD do very little to solve the situation. Not only that, but they take advantage of it to double the prices of new releases.
The announcement of the mining blockade and the launch of exclusive cards for mining has been just smoke, a marketing and image move that in practice has been useless.
And the new card models announced in recent weeks do not solve the problem, by offering old or inadequate hardware, twice the price.
In an attempt to supply the market and bypass miners with underpowered hardware, NVIDIA announced a few days ago a new card from the last generation, with outdated raytracing performance, the RTX 2060, adding a little more memory, 12GB. And the new entry-level RTX 3050.
They are cards that do not serve gamers because they don’t have enough power for next-gen games, unless you play at 1080p, or at 4K without ray tracing and with Low or Medium graphics.
But instead, these new models go on sale at exorbitant prices.
A card RTX 2060 it cost in 2019 around 299 euros. This new model, identical but with a little more memory, is worth in stores between 600 and 800 euros.
Today NVIDIA announced the new RTX 3080 with 12 GB of RAM. For the first time in its history, as it tells Techspot, NVIDIA has not put PVP (retail price) to the card, and has vetoed all reviews until launch day.
Apparently he does not want people to compare the RRP with the price that is sold in stores, because it is going to skyrocket. And the performance is not going to be much higher than a RTX 3080 standard, which has a RRP of 719 euros.
The price of the new model, according to the assembler EVGA, It will be 1,249 dollars. If we add VAT, here it will be around the 1,400 euros. Double the RRP of the RTX 3080.
The new one RTX 3080 with 12GB RAM It has a Samsung GPU made with 8 nm technology, 8960 CUDA cores, 280 TMUs, 104 ROPs, 280 Tensor Cores, 70 RT Cores, a 384-bit bus, and a bandwidth of 912 GB / sg.
They are specifications 3% higher than the RTX 3080, except for the memory, which goes up from 10 to 12 GB. The TGP also goes up from 320 to 350W.
Does this hardware justify the double price?
The feeling is that NVIDIA is doing little to curb card hoarding by cryptocurrency mining. Neither improvements are seen in the stock, and with their new cards either it falls short on hardware, or it encourages price increases.
Unattainable prices for many gamers, who previously could buy a powerful graphics card for 500 euros, and now it has to see how NVIDIA launches outdated models from three years ago at a higher price, or double the price of the current generation.
Hopefully the expected Intel Arc gaming graphics cards, manage to unblock this situation. Gamers need to hold on to any burning nail, seeing as how no one does anything to help them.